Initially, I noticed in the reading that Aristotle pairs up opposite emotions as he defines and discusses them (anger vs. calm, friendship vs. enmity, etc.). This technique interests me as I do not know the reasoning behind it. My guess is that Aristotle was attempting to show the drastic differences between emotions by contrasting opposites.
Aristotle states that “fear is associated with the expectation that something destructive will happen to us, plainly nobody will be afraid who believes nothing can happen to him.” However, this description of the conditions under which people feel fear seems a bit inadequate to me. This description made me wonder how Aristotle would explain the fear associated with scary movies, spiders, etc. These are harmless things which do not make people “feel that they really are in danger of something,” and yet these things cause certain people to feel fear.
Aristotle also states that pity is “a feeling of pain caused by the sight of some evil, destructive or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it, and which we might expect to befall ourselves or some friends of ours, and moreover to befall us soon.” Aristotle’s discussion of pity made me think of the poster Professor Davis showed the class on the first day of classes. Considering my own feelings of pity towards the girl on the poster, I realized Aristotle really does accurately define pity and state the conditions under which people feel pity.
The question you raise about the fear one feels at a scary movie got me wondering how it might be that we experience fear at a scary movie. We are usually not in imminent danger when we go to movies, therefore, by Aristotle's definition, we shouldn't be fearful, yet we do experience a degree of fear. I certainly don't have the answers, but my first thought was that we experience the fear vicariously through the characters in the movie. Or maybe what we feel at a scary movie isn't fear, but suspense, adrenaline, or panic that we mistake for fear. It's a good question.
ReplyDeleteI think you also brought up an interesting point about fear: what about the things that can't actually harm us? But I think that when we were talking about the emotion of pity in class, the example of the Haitian earthquake came up. I don't live in fear or believe that this suffering can befall me. But because I can associate some kind of suffering that I've experienced on some level to the experience of an earthquake, that is why I feel pity. I think the same goes for fear. It's not that I believe that a stalker/psycho will come cut me up to pieces, but I've had a cut, can imagine what it would be like to be stabbed, etc. Maybe that's an inaccurate picture of what Aristotle is saying about fear, but I think that is all that makes sense to me in conjunction with his definition. We have experienced some kind of danger, and to see it in those forms in movies is just our experience multiplied.
ReplyDeleteInteresting, you raise a good point about fear. I once talked to a friend who told me that he no longer experienced fear when watching horror movies or playing scary video games. His explanation: as he was getting older, he was no longer “getting into” the game. He was no longer immersing himself in the game the way he used when he was younger. This leads me to believe that the fear we feel when watching movies comes from our bond with the characters.
ReplyDeleteThe movies that scare us the most are the ones that draw us in and connect us with the on-screen characters. Through our bond with the characters, we empathize, feeling the emotions (fear, in particular) that characters go through.
Think about it: would the same horror movie induce the same amount of fear if all the human characters were replaced by animals? Or if you took the scariest scene from a horror movie and played it by itself, would you feel the same amount of fear? I think not.
In this sense, I agree with Suzi: we do feel fear vicariously through the characters in the movie, but only because we are related to and connect with the characters.